Page 218 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Moreover, the criteria used to decide which objects donated by members of the public should

be included in the museum’s displays were themselves subject to debate, thus revealing tensions

about what constituted “authentic” (premodern, folkloric, native) and “inauthentic” (modern, urban,

external) materials. For some commentators, the participation of local people, if not properly policed,

could be damaging to the prestige of the whole regional project. When the archeologist Ludwik

Sawicki wrote about the Volhynian museum in a nationwide journal in 1930, he expressed dismay

that some of the watercolor paintings that graced the walls had been done by schoolchildren and

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ended up in the museum “only as a result of some kind of misunderstanding.” In his eyes, the

pottery collections were similarly of little historical value, while the pipes were frequently modern

imports, rather than native creations, and needed to be removed from the museum’s displays. In

short, since the regionalist project cast members of the local intelligentsia in the role of gatekeepers,

it was their version of Polish history that shaped the outer limits of what was acceptable—and led to

decisions about what should be expunged.

JAKUB HOFFMAN’S REGIONAL PROJECT

Local members of the pro-Sanacja Union of Polish Teachers (Związek Polskiego Nauczycielstwa)

played a particularly important role in the collection of knowledge about Volhynia’s far-flung, and

often isolated, rural communities. One way in which they did this was through the distribution of

questionnaires that targeted literate members of the rural intelligentsia, such as teachers, village

heads, and foresters. In 1931, a questionnaire, which was issued in the Volhynian School Board

Bulletin (Dziennik urzędowy kuratorium okręgu szkolnego wołyńskiego), claimed that teachers

needed to know more about contemporary social and economic life in Volhynia in order to record the

32 Ludwik Sawicki, “Muzeum Wołyńskie w Łucku,” Ziemia, August 15, 1930, 344.

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